For a proprietary radio protocol on the NRF52833, is it possible to use the radio in 1Mbps BLE mode to use the angle of arrival feature? Are there any drawbacks? Why is there a Nordic 1Mbps mode and a BLE 1Mbps mode?

[robwasab]

We have a custom radio protocol that manipulates the radio registers directly (on the '32) and I'm evaluating whether or not we can switch to the '33 to use it's angle of arrival features.

The thing that trips me up, is that it seems we have to operate the radio in BLE 1 Mpbs mode to use the AoA feature. Is it possible to operate in this mode and just not use Bluetooth protocol stack via softdevice? Silly question I know, but there must be an important reason why there is a separate Nordic and BLE mode for 1 Mpbs. Perhaps it's because the radio would be able to receive BLE packets from other devices and that would be bad.

The point is, is that I'd like to use the angle of arrival feature in our proprietary radio protocol currently implemented on an NRF52832 by switching to the '33.

[Andreas]

Hi,

 

Yes it is possible to use BLE1M without using the Softdevice. The reason for separate 'NRF mode' and 'BLE mode' is that the nRF mode was used in nRF24 series devices, long before BLE was a thing, and is kept in nRF52 devices for backwards compatibility. When BLE was released, the BLE mode was added to be compliant with the slightly different spec, having a higher FSK frequency deviation. As you say, the DF feature is available for BLE1M and BLE2M modes.

 

Best regards,

Andreas

[Stetina]

Be aware of that you will get CTE signal of 160kHz in NRF mode, instead of 250kHz like in BLE.